Marauding gangs of monkeys invade Rio.

From Treehugger:

In Rio de Janeiro, bold bands of marauding monkeys are turning to a life of looting and mischief. By the dozens, young capuchin monkeys have been descending the nearby hills to sneak into homes and steal fruit and other food from unsuspecting residents -- wreaking havoc in the process. "They come in, make a mess, break and throw everything onto the floor," says one distraught resident of Rio's primate-sacked South Zone. But local experts say that kind-hearted humans may be to blame for unleashing this proverbial barrel of monkeys.

Sure, in still-photos and wildlife documentaries, capachin monkey are undeniably adorable and seem rather harmless,but the recent slew of break-ins and thefts have familiarized locals with their more cunning qualities. In fact, an investigation from Jornal Floripa recorded some surprisingly well-orchestrated incidents of looting. By mimicking a birdcall, one monkey alerts countless others hidden that the latest home invasion will soon be underway.

ZombieWatch: New virus jumps from monkey to lab worker.

From Science:

It started with a single monkey coming down with pneumonia at the California National Primate Research Center in Davis. Within weeks, 19 monkeys were dead and three humans were sick. Now, a new report confirms that the Davis outbreak was the first known case of an adenovirus jumping from monkeys to humans. The upside: the virus may one day be harnessed as a tool for gene therapy.

Adenoviruses are relatively large DNA viruses—as opposed to many other viruses that replicate using RNA—that commonly cause colds and respiratory infections in humans. They're also responsible for a variety of illnesses in cattle, dogs, horses, pigs, and other animals, but scientists thought the viruses and their ailments couldn't jump between species.

Then, on 14 May 2009, a healthy adult male titi monkey—a small, reddish-brown species that calls much of South America home—came down with a cough at the Davis primate center and soon became lethargic and wouldn't eat. Staff members gave the animal intravenous fluids and antibiotics, but its condition worsened, and after 5 days staff members euthanized him. Four weeks later, another titi monkey came down with the same symptoms. Then another. And another. Within 2 months, 23 of the 65-strong population had become sick, and 19 eventually died. A team led by infectious diseases researcher Charles Chiu of the University of California, San Francisco, analyzed lung tissue samples from the dead monkeys and identified a never-before-seen adenovirus, which they named titi monkey adenovirus (TMAdV).

But where did the virus come from? It's unlikely it originated in the titi monkeys themselves, Chiu says: "Hosts that are that susceptible to a disease are not likely to be its originators." So the researchers asked whether any lab workers had been sick during that period. One person, who had had close daily contact with the monkeys, reported coming down with a fever, chills, a headache, a dry cough, and a burning sensation in her lungs—hallmarks of the kinds of respiratory infection commonly caused by adenoviruses. Two of her family members reported similar, though less severe, symptoms in subsequent weeks.

Neither the lab worker nor her family members sought medical attention, and all recovered within 4 weeks, after which it was too late for researchers to swab for traces of the adenoviruses directly. Instead, they examined the patients' blood for antibodies and compared them with those found in the infected monkeys. The lab worker and one of her family members showed a match, suggesting that the monkeys gave the virus to the lab worker or vice versa. But when the team tested a representative set of 81 blood samples from donors in the western United States, none had antibodies. That suggests humans weren't the source of the outbreak either.

Charity offers baby as raffle prize.

This is bizarre. How is this legal? From Washington Post:

Games of chance give lucky people the opportunity to win almost anything, from a goldfish at a carnival to millions of dollars. Now a charity in Britain is giving one couple the chance to have a baby.

To Hatch, a charity that offers fertility treatment advice, will sell £20 raffle tickets to couples who want a chance to win £25,000 worth of in vitro fertilization treatments. This controversial lottery, set to launch July 30, has been received with some criticism.

Anyone can enter to the contest and can give the prize to someone else if they win, according to the Telegraph.. If IVF treatments fails, then the charity will offer a surrogate, donor eggs or surgery.

To Hatch founder Camille Strachan said the lottery comes at a time when the National Health Service, Britain’s publicly funded health care system, has undergone budget cuts: “We hope the To Hatch Lottery can ease the burden on the NHS and reduce the stress slightly on some of those who are struggling.”

Josephine Quintavalle, director of the Comment on Reproductive Ethics, told the Telegraph the lottery “demeans the whole nature of human reproduction.” She also questioned the legality of the practice to Sky News.

“This latest initiative, turning the process of reproduction into a buy-your-ticket lottery, is absolutely unacceptable and quite possibly breaks European Law on the commercialization of human tissue,” she said. “It is in this area where an immediate investigation should be demanded. It is surely not legal to pay £20 to have access to another woman’s womb?”

The charity’s Web site was down Wednesday shortly after the announcement went viral. A message on the site read, “To Hatch is currently offline for site-wide maintenance, it will be up and running shortly.” It was later changed to, “Due to overwhelming demand the To Hatch website is currently offline for site-wide maintenance. It will be back up and running as soon as possible.”

U.S. to send condolences after military suicides.

Amazing to think that people were against this because they thought it would encourage suicide! From NY Times:

Breaking with longstanding concerns that officially memorializing military suicides might encourage them, President Obama announced on Wednesday that he would begin sending letters of condolence to the families of troops who kill themselves in combat zones.

“This decision was made after a difficult and exhaustive review of the former policy, and I did not make it lightly,” the president said in a statement. “This issue is emotional, painful and complicated, but these Americans served our nation bravely. They didn’t die because they were weak.”

As the number of military suicides has surged since 2001, the issue of presidential letters — which are sent to the families of every service member killed in action — has become a source of great dismay among families of suicides. Some organized letter-writing campaigns and prodded members of Congress to introduce legislation to overturn the policy, which has existed for several administrations.

In 2009, the Obama administration demurred, citing widespread concerns among veterans groups and senior military officers that such letters might be construed as sanctioning suicide. But on Wednesday, citing an 18-month review of the policy, Mr. Obama said he had concluded that by recognizing certain suicides, he might destigmatize the problem of mental illness within the military and thereby encourage service members to seek counseling.

“The fact that they didn’t get the help they needed must change,” the president’s statement said. “Our men and women in uniform have borne the incredible burden of our wars, and we need to do everything in our power to honor their service, and to help them stay strong for themselves, for their families and for our nation.”

The new policy, which was first reported by CBS News, will apply only to troops who commit suicide in officially designated combat zones, mainly Afghanistan and Iraq. The letters will differ from those sent to troops killed in combat, though the White House declined to say precisely how.

In recent years, the military suicide rate has been above the rate for the general population, a reflection, experts say, of the stress of rapid-tempo combat operations and multiple deployments. But a majority of those suicides, 295 last year among active-duty personnel, have been committed outside combat zones, mostly in the United States.

Woman dies at her own funeral.

From Daily Mail:

A woman died from a heart attack caused by shock after waking up to discover she had been declared dead - and was being prepared for burial.

As mourning relatives filed past her open coffin the supposedly dead woman suddenly woke up and started screaming as she realised where she was.

Fagilyu Mukhametzyanov, 49, had been wrongly declared deceased by doctors but died for real after hearing mourners saying prayers for her soul to be taken up to heaven in Kazan, Russia.

Deep history of coconuts decoded.

"Are you suggesting coconuts migrate?" From WUSTL:

The coconut (the fruit of the palm Cocos nucifera) is the Swiss Army knife of the plant kingdom; in one neat package it provides a high-calorie food, potable water, fiber that can be spun into rope, and a hard shell that can be turned into charcoal. What’s more, until it is needed for some other purpose it serves as a handy flotation device.

No wonder people from ancient Austronesians to Captain Bligh pitched a few coconuts aboard before setting sail. (The mutiny of the Bounty is supposed to have been triggered by Bligh’s harsh punishment of the theft of coconuts from the ship’s store.)

So extensively is the history of the coconut interwoven with the history of people traveling that Kenneth Olsen, a plant evolutionary biologist, didn’t expect to find much geographical structure to coconut genetics when he and his colleagues set out to examine the DNA of more than 1300 coconuts from all over the world.

“I thought it would be mostly a mish-mash,” he says, thoroughly homogenized by humans schlepping coconuts with them on their travels.

He was in for a surprise. It turned out that there are two clearly differentiated populations of coconuts, a finding that strongly suggests the coconut was brought under cultivation in two separate locations, one in the Pacific basin and the other in the Indian Ocean basin. What’s more, coconut genetics also preserve a record of prehistoric trade routes and of the colonization of the Americas.

The discoveries of the team, which included Bee Gunn, now of the Australian National University in Australia, and Luc Baudouin of the Centre International de Recherches en Agronomie pour le Développement (CIRAD) in Montpellier, France, as well as Olsen, associate professor of biology at Washington University in St. Louis, are described in the June 23 online issue of the journal PLoS One.

Blogger jailed 30 days for saying beef noodles were too salty.

What's even more crazy is that she was right about the cockroaches. From Daily Mail:

A scathing review led to a Taiwanese blogger being sent to prison and ordered to pay compensation to the restaurant she criticised.

The Taichung branch of Taiwan High Court on Tuesday sentenced the blogger, surnamed Liu, to 30 days in detention and two years of probation and handover NT$200,000 for her harsh review of the 'salty beef noodles'.

The blogger writes about a variety of topics, giving her opinion on food, health and interior design, and has received more than 60,000 hits on her website.

After visiting a Taichung beef noodle restaurant in July 2008, where she had dried noodles and side dishes, Liu wrote that the restaurant served food that was too salty, the place was unsanitary because there were cockroaches and that the owner was a 'bully' because he let customers park their cars haphazardly, leading to traffic jams, according to the Taipei Times.

The restaurant’s owner, surnamed Yang, learned about Liu’s blog post from a regular customer, and filed charges against her, accusing her of defamation.

The Taichung District Court ruled that Liu’s criticism of the restaurant exceeded reasonable bounds and sentenced her to 30 days in detention, a ruling that Liu appealed.

The High Court found that Liu’s criticism about cockroaches in the restaurant to be a narration of facts, not intentional slander, the news website reported.

However, the judge also ruled that Liu should not have criticized all the restaurant’s food as too salty because she only had one dish on her single visit.

Health officials who inspected the restaurant did not find conditions to be as unsanitary as Liu had described, so the High Court also ruled that Liu must pay NT$200,000 to the owner for revenues lost as a result of her blog post.

Liu has apologized to the restaurant for the incident.

Yang said he filed the charges because Liu’s negative comments about his restaurant led to many customers calling him to ask if her review was true.

He said he hoped the case would teach her a lesson.

Huang Cheng-lee, a lawyer in Taichung, said that bloggers who post food reviews should remember to be truthful in their commentary and supplement their comments with photographs to protect themselves.

He also said bloggers should be objective and fair in their writing.

Connecticut citizens use fountain as toilet.

From Yahoo! News:

NEW LONDON, Conn. – Officials in New London, Conn., turned off the water at the city's new waterfront fountain over the weekend, because people have been using it as a toilet.

The fountain was activated last month and features a sculpture of a whale's tail with water spilling over it, which visitors are encouraged to run through.

City Councilor Michael Buscetto III tells The Day of New London that since the fountain opened, police have responded to calls of people urinating, defecating and showering in the fountain water. He said some people who have cut themselves have also used the fountain to rinse off blood.

City Manager Denise Rose says police are developing a plan to better keep an eye on the area.

Flying bear kills two Canadians in freak accident.

From Yahoo! News:

OTTAWA (Reuters) – Two Canadians died instantly in a freak accident when a car hit a 440-pound (200-kg) black bear and sent the animal flying straight through the windshield of an oncoming vehicle, local media said Wednesday.

The bear's body hit the 25-year-old driver and a 40-year-old man sitting behind her and then shot out of the back window. The bear also died.

The accident happened Monday night in a rural area about 25 miles north of the federal capital Ottawa.

"We don't see (this) often, even if we live in the country. Lots of deer, but collisions with a bear and two people died? That's really rare," local police spokesman Martin Fournel told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.

Collisions between vehicles and animals are common in Canada, which has a healthy population of large wild animals such as moose and deer.

Coozer-Bits.

Yipes: Jellyfish invade FL beach, sting 1600 people!

WTF: 12 arrested for feeding the homeless in Orlando.

Lame: Woman-hating Santorum says abortion exception to protect mother's health is "phony."

PSA: Citibank confirms hacking attack.

Science: Periodic table adds two new superheavy elements.

Russian man buries himself for luck, dies.

From NY Daily News:

A superstitious Russian man died after burying himself alive in the hopes it would bring him "good luck."

The 35-year-old computer programmer told friends that spending a night underground would bring him good fortune for the rest of his life.

"According to his friend, the man wanted to test his endurance and insistently asked his friend to help him spend the night buried," police official Alexei Lubinsky told the BBC.

The victim dug a hole in his garden in the eastern city of Blagoveshchensk and created an improvised coffin with pipes for air.

With a cell phone and a bottle of water in hand, he hopped in and had his friend cover the coffin with about eight inches of dirt.

Heavy rain fell overnight and when the friend returned the next morning, his pal was dead.

Police suspect the rain somehow blocked the air supply.

A similarly bizarre fate met a another man in Russia last summer after pals buried him. They found him dead an hour-and-a-half later, crushed by the weight of the dirt.

Bees swarm in Little Italy.

This has the whole city a-buzz! From NY Post:

It was the biggest sting operation in Little Italy since the Gambinos were driven off.

Crowds of people stopped to gape at a bizarre bee swarm (left) yesterday at a mailbox on the corner of Mulberry and Grand streets, snapping cellphone pictures and calling friends to marvel at the little bit of country in the midst of the big city.

Andrew Cote, president of New York City Beekeepers, said there was nothing to worry about, as the buzzers are as sweet as honey when they travel in packs.

"Bees are most docile when they swarm," he said.

"They have no hive to protect, and they pose absolutely no threat."

A beekeeper from his group helped the NYPD move the bugs to a safe location, he said.

"People keep bees in New York City, and it's not unusual for them to swarm," Cote said.

"It happens many times. I just picked up a swarm in The Bronx."

But another beekeeper, Chet Crowl, said it's lucky the insects were quickly moved, because "the longer they stay, the more aggressive they get."

Last year, the New York City Board of Health lifted a ban on beekeeping.

Man attacks girlfriend's car with forklift, lifting it with her inside.

From NY Daily News:

A Massachusetts man used a forklift to attack his girlfriend's car, hoisting the vehicle off the ground with the woman inside, cops said.

Then the angry boyfriend slammed the car down on the street several feet away.

Brian Hurley, 41, of Springfield, Mass., began fighting with his girlfriend over money as she dropped him off at work at New England Warehousing Inc. on Saturday morning, police said.

The victim, who was not identified, told cops that Hurley slapped her and then hopped out of her car and began kicking it, causing several dents.

The enraged beau then jumped into the cab of a nearby forklift, steered the forks underneath her car and lifted it into the air.

Hurley split before police arrived, but was later busted when cops found him banging on the door of his home, Springfield's WWLP television reported.

He was charged with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, assault and battery, and damaging a car.

The woman wasn't seriously injured.

Amazon rainforest activist shot dead.

Meant to post this last week. How awful. From the Guardian:

Six months after predicting his own murder, a leading rainforest defender has reportedly been gunned down in the Brazilian Amazon. José Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva and his wife, Maria do Espírito Santo, are said to have been killed in an ambush near their home in Nova Ipixuna, in Pará state, about 37 miles from Marabá.

According to a local newspaper, Diário do Pará, the couple had not had police protection despite getting frequent death threats because of their battle against illegal loggers and ranchers.

On Tuesday there were conflicting reports from about whether the killing happened on Monday night or Tuesday morning. A police spokesperson said there were reports of a "double homicide" at the settlement called Maçaranduba 2.

In a speech at a TEDx event in Manaus, in November, Da Silva spoke of his fears that loggers would try to silence him. "I could be here today talking to you and in one month you will get the news that I disappeared. I will protect the forest at all costs. That is why I could get a bullet in my head at any moment … because I denounce the loggers and charcoal producers, and that is why they think I cannot exist. [People] ask me, 'are you afraid?' Yes, I'm a human being, of course I am afraid. But my fear does not silence me. As long as I have the strength to walk I will denounce all of those who damage the forest."

Roberto Smeraldi, founder and director of the environmental group Amigos da Terra, who worked with Da Silva in the Amazon, said he had been in a meeting with Brazil's president, Dilma Rousseff, discussing changes to the forest code when the news broke of Da Silva being killed. "He was convinced he would be killed one day," Smeraldi said. He added that Da Silva had been "very active" in the fight against illegal forest burning and logging. According to Brazilian media reports, Rousseff has asked her chief of staff, Gilberto Carvalho, to offer support to the murder investigation.

"We now have another Chico Mendes," said Felipe Milanez, an environmental journalist from São Paulo, referring to the Amazonian rubber-tapper who became an environmental martyr after his murder in 1988. Milanez said that in a recent phone conversation with Da Silva's wife she had suggested the situation was "getting very ugly". Milanez added: "He knew the threats were very real. He was scared."

A 2008 report compiled by Brazilian human rights groups listed Da Silva as one of dozens of Amazon human rights and environmental activists "considered at risk" of assassination.

Study: Bad boys really do bamboozle women.

From the Toronto Star:

Hey guys, if you’re on the prowl, you can drop the nice guy act.

By a wide margin, women really do find bad boys more attractive than their kind and happy counterparts, a new University of British Columbia study says.

“That’s very much what we found,” says UBC psychologist Jessica Tracy, the lead study author.

The study, which involved about 1,000 people split evenly between men and women, had subjects view pictures of opposite sex individuals displaying expressions of pride, shame, happiness or a neutral demeanour.

The participants were then asked to rate their attractiveness on a scale of one to nine.

For women, Tracy says, a proud physical expression made males most alluring. But close behind, those men who had sagging shouldered shame written large on their faces were given surprisingly high attractiveness ratings.

“What we didn’t expect was that women would find happy men really, really unattractive,” says Tracy. “And that’s exactly what we found. It was the least attractive thing men could show.”

The study was released Tuesday by the American Psychological Association journal Emotion.

While a proud man’s attractiveness to women may be easily explained on an evolutionary level, the allure of the bad boy is more elusive, says Tracy, who specializes in physical expressions of emotion.

“Pride conveys high status, strength, power (and) these are all pretty good things to have in a mate,” she says.

Bad boys, depicted in the photo arrays with “brooding” expressions, may well elicit a desire in women to both forgive the guy and to fix him up, Tracy says.

Girl Scout cookies kill orangutans.

From the Wall Street Journal:

To earn their Girl Scout Bronze Award four years ago, Rhiannon Tomtishen and Madison Vorva set out to study orangutans.

Instead, they wound up investigating Thin Mints, Trefoils and Samoas.

What they uncovered soured them on the sweets and has put the Michigan teens at odds with Girl Scouts of the USA. Now they're on a march to change the recipe for Girl Scout cookies.

Their target: palm oil, which can come from places the primates live.

The girls, who have been scouts since they were five, have rallied troops across the country. Scouts sold 198 million boxes of cookies last year, but now some say they're done. Scouts and leaders have criticized their nonprofit organization on Facebook and Twitter.

"My troop is up in arms," says Nicole Bell, a Lansing, Kan., leader and former scout. "They do not want to sell cookies next year."

The Girl Scouts organization says its bakers have told them there isn't a good alternative to palm oil that would ensure the same taste, texture and shelf life. "Girls sell cookies from Texas to Hawaii and those cookies have to be sturdy," says Amanda Hamaker, product sales manager for Girl Scouts of the USA.

[...] Hoping to help orangutans, the Michigan teens want the Scouts to either remove palm oil entirely from cookies, or use sustainably grown palm oil.

CDC releases zombie apocalypse guidelines.

From the Daily Mail:

The next time a decaying corpse approaches you in the street, you'll know what to do.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has posted guidance telling people what to do in a ‘zombie apocalypse’ - and they don’t advise shooting the walking dead.

A light-hearted blog post by the organisation said U.S. citizens should prepare an emergency kit and then look for a zombie-free refugee camp.

But the Zombie Apocalypse campaign has a serious side as it intends to familiarise Americans with disaster preparedness techniques for the hurricane season.

‘There are all kinds of emergencies out there that we can prepare for,’ wrote infectious disease specialist Dr Ali Khan. ‘Take a zombie apocalypse for example.

‘You may laugh now, but when it happens you'll be happy you read this, and hey, maybe you'll even learn a thing or two about how to prepare for a real emergency.’

The blog post drove so much traffic that it crashed the website on Thursday, and it came just days before an evangelist’s prediction of the May 21 ‘Judgment Day’.

‘If you prepare for the zombie apocalypse, you'll be prepared for all hazards,’ a CDC spokesman said.

The CDC said disaster preparedness involves putting together an emergency kit, coming up with an emergency plan and having two meet-up spots.

It recommends an emergency kit should include water, food, medication, battery-powered radio, a utility knife and vital documents.

Rigorous study confirms video game playing increases food intake.

I blame Pac-Man. From EurekAlert:

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that almost 18% of US teens are obese. Although most experts agree that our growing obesity "epidemic" is driven by both inadequate physical activity and excessive caloric intake, implementing solutions is extraordinarily difficult. One area that has caught the attention of health researchers is the observation that trends in video game playing parallel obesity rates on a population basis. Furthermore, several studies have documented a positive association between how much time a child plays video games and his or her chance of being obese. However, correlation does not necessarily imply causality, and controlled intervention studies are required to test whether playing video games causes children to increase their food intake and/or decrease their energy expenditure. In the first such study of this kind, Canadian and Danish researchers tested their hypothesis that video game playing is accompanied by increased spontaneous food intake.

"This study is an especially important piece of the scientific puzzle in this arena because it went beyond simply simultaneously documenting the relationship between video game playing and food intake in kids," said Shelley McGuire, PhD, American Society for Nutrition spokesperson. "Instead, it actually studied the same group of children during two separate, experimentally-administered periods of rest and video-game play, and then used gold-standard methods to measure important outcomes such as food intake, energy expenditure, and feelings of hunger and appetite. Consequently, the results can be used with a high degree of confidence to suggest that playing virtual soccer can affect food intake. Very interesting! Given our current obesity "crisis" in kids, I will be curious to follow the results of follow-up studies. For instance, do violent games or educational games have the same effect as sports-related games?"

Amtrak passenger kicked off train for talking too loudly.

Finally, Amtrak does something right. From HuffPo:

An Amtrak train made an unexpected stop Sunday, as a woman was escorted off for speaking loudly on her cell phone.

Lakeysha Beard, 39, was charged with disorderly conduct after she wouldn't stop talking on the 16-hour trip from Oakland, California, to Salem, Oregon. The train was stopped short of its destination.

Train operators called police due to passenger complaints, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. Beard's car was designated a "quiet car."

Beard told Portland's KATU News that she felt "disrespected" by the incident.

Watermelons explode like land mines in China.

From the Daily News (also submitted by Jen C):

Chinese farmers discovered how science can go bad after fields of watermelons exploded like "land mines" after being over-pumped with growth chemicals.

The chilling chemistry calamity struck after a group of 20 farmers in Jiangsu Province used a growth accelerator for the first time during a period of heavy rains.

That caused hundreds of groaning melons to pop like balloons, state broadcaster CCTV reported.

"On May 7, I came out and counted 80 but by the afternoon it was 100," said farmer Liu Mingsuo. "Two days later I didn't bother to count anymore."

The chemical involved is legal and is often used in the U.S. with kiwis and grapes, but underscores China's recent troubles with the unregulated use of chemicals in the nation's food supply.